r/PublicFreakout is a subreddit that’s “dedicated to people freaking out, melting down, losing their cool, or being weird in public.“. It has almost 5 million members.

It has been in my Reddit rotation for a few years. Based on the description, you can imagine endless entertaining scenarios that get caught on camera, most of which you can’t look away from when you watch. Here are the current top five videos:

1. Two kids get caught spitting into bottles of soda in a convenience store.
2. A motorcyclist does a wheelie, flips off a cop, then crashes into an innocent car.
3. Israeli solders attack Palestinian farmers.
4. A guy in a convenience store slaps a woman’s butt.
5. People film and protest a Trump rally.

It didn’t occur to me until recently that this is kind of a bad subreddit. Let me define bad. If I showed someone the front page and they’d never seen it before, they’d probably scroll for a few minutes, laugh a few times, gasp once or twice, then move on. It’s not bad in the sense that it’s promoting nazi propaganda or something, but I mean bad for the soul.

Negative content drives engagement, typically the shorter the better. As addicting as it is, it seems clear that interacting with this content on a regular basis is not good for the average person. Plus, the subreddit drives home two things that I despise:

1. Always being ready to film people in public

The notion that your video may go viral gives people incentive to film anytime something seems like it might escalate. It also may encourage people TO escalate things just for the sake of the footage. While it can be useful in some cases, like filming a crime, most of the time it’s just obnoxious.

2. Publicizing people’s worst moments

In the moment, it may seem good to post these. Even justified. And sometimes I would agree! Fuck the kids who were spitting into soda bottles! But there’s a line, and the more willing we are as a society to judge and shame people based on one 30 second clip, the worse off in my opinion.

It’s the sort of mindless drivel I picture taking over dystopian futures. You can scroll this page for 10 minutes and not realize it. When I did that, I just started feeling bad about myself, people, society, the world, which is why I’m QUITTING it. A small step, but in a world filled with distractions, this feels like a very obvious one to cut out.